Quick Hitts

Yet another installment in what has become the most commented on feature of Quick Hitts – a list of things done in the name of religion, from the asinine to the atrocious.

A new law in Afghanistan allows men to demand sex from their wives every four days, and to keep them indoors as long as they like.

Combining Islam and Nicotine Nannies can be deadly. A Malaysian couple asked relatives for help. He wanted to quit smoking and she wanted a cure for asthma and a liver disease. Their four loving relatives smashed the couple’s head on a table and beat them with helmets and brooms. Until they were dead. When their 15 year old daughter stumbled on to the carnage they beat her almost to death as well.

In Pakistan Taliban militants are preventing the UN from administering the Polio vaccine to 300,000 children. At last, someone the anti-vaxers can have a beer with. Oh, wait. . .

Kentucky passed a law requiring all Homeland Security operations credit God with protecting them. The law lists the office’s initial duty as “stressing the dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the Commonwealth.” They’re also required to install a plaque that states “The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.”

In Boulder Colorado Derik Bonestroo fired a gun into the ceiling of his workplace and told everyone if they weren’t a christian they were going to die. He asked Brian Mahon if he were Christian. Brian said he was catholic. That was the wrong kind of christian, evidently, because Bonestroo shot him in the head.

The Rev. Joseph Illo, pastor of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Modesto, California, sent out 15,000 letters to the members of his parish telling them if they voted for Obama they’d have to go to confession before receiving communion.

In Saudi Arabia a 75 year old woman was caught with two men in her house. One was a 24 year old man she had wet-nursed, so she considered him a son. The other was delivering bread. In accordance with the loving, peaceful religion of Islam she was sentenced to 100 lashes, four months in jail, and deportation.

Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar rented a Jeep Cherokee and ran over students at an NC university. He did it to avenge the death of Muslims world wide. Evidently he missed Mosque the day they gave “how to run over people” lessons, because all his victims survived. Because of his failure when he dies he’s only going to get the really ugly virgins.

@John: The last one’s been around for a while. At least, I’ve found it before.

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Most of these I’ve never even heard of. But oh my damn, this is absolutely disgusting. Yet another example of religious texts either being interpreted way out of context by zealots, or (worse), being interpreted literally and applied to modern situations. Some of these articles (like the one about that little old woman getting whipped) make me want to puke.

I was skimming some of that stuff on the Unreasonable Faith site. Wow, there are some real loony tune podlings on that one.

Like John C, who speaks much and says nothing? He is their resident proselytizer. He’s not the only one, obviously, but he’s always there.

I’m kind of liking Clergy Guy, though. He’s got actual questions, he’s not condescending, and he’s honest about his feelings. If more religious people were like him, we might actually be able to communicate.

To sum it up, Atheist Keith wants to know if literalists condone forcing rape victims to marry their rapist. Because Deuteronomy commands it.

Deuteronomy 22:28-29: If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay the girl’s father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the girl, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives. (NIV)

He then says:

And so, I issue the following challenge to anyone who cares to accept it, but especially to anyone who holds that the Bible is a book of good morals

Challenge you make the following three declarations:

1. I denounce rape (when defined as non-consensual sexual activity involving violence, use of force, or threat of harm) as morally wrong.

2. I denounce as evil the practice of forcing rape victims to marry their rapists or to otherwise punish rape victims.

3. I denounce as evil the inclusion of an injunction or commandment in any law, code of ethics, or any other statement of moral principles, which requires, compels, or encourages a rape victim to marry to her rapist.

Since the Bible does contain such an injunction, accepting this challenge necessarily means that you are denouncing the Bible, declaring it NOT to be a good source of moral guidance. Or, at the very least, you would be declaring that the Bible contains and endorses commandments that you consider to be evil.

And…

Out of all the Christians I have ever discussed this verse with, only one was willing to condemn the practice of forcing rape victims to marry their rapists.

I think you’ll find that very, very few so-called Christians have ever read more than a sentence or two here and there. They rely on what they’re told is in there for their “information”. It would be good if you could get people to actually see what’s in there, but any attempt to do so would be taken over by those with an agenda to get you to see it their way, rather than simply reading it with an open mind, which very few Christians actually possess.

I find it something of an amazement that the Bible is still around. Given how many of its decrees are against what we now consider basal needs — like the ability for women to decline sex at will. I propose that the Bible be investigated by an impartial third party, whose task it will be to find the more atrocious passages and present them to Christian groups.

Seriously though, I’d laugh if it wasn’t so damn not-funny. The Bible condones things we’ve long since acknowledged as inhumane — yet, we allow people to read the Bible and other religious texts, and take them literally, instead of ratifying that it’s most likely a book of fiction, and should not be taken as anything but allegory. It needs to stop.

Lol. It of course makes much more sense that we were an arts and crafts project.

Don’t read the comments there. It’s like deja vu. I think we need to have copy/paste answers written somewhere, since theists rehash the same old arguments over and over. Card #1: 20th Century Dictators and Personality Cults. Card #2: Not a Belief System. And so on.

“Life begins at conception”… Funny, though, how they never really call on wifebeaters as murderers. I know at least one woman who’s had a miscarriage because her partner used her as a punching bag. If that’s not murder, then it’s at the very least manslaughter. But no.

Then again, the idea is that one is to stay with one’s abuser anyway. So.

And if we’re talking extremists, the most extreme won’t even allow for abortion in order to save the mother’s life. The hell is that? I suspect these are the same people who let their children die rather than go to the doctor or hospital. (Not to mention the psychos who think it’s ok to shoot the doctor.)

I was reading a blog a week or so ago, where the guy (can’t remember his name) had come back to his senses on medical treatment and realized how lucky it was that his child didn’t need life saving treatment while he was brainwashed. That has to be a scary feeling.

Here’s a thing atheists didn’t do. WARNING: There is a really disturbing graphic on that page. Like you may be happier if you don’t see it. I’ve seen it and I still can’t bring myself to look at it when I’m on the page. Makes it hard to read the article…

The article is called Equality? ‘Real Muslim women in Mali don’t want it – it’s un-Islamic!’ It talks about the opposition to a law giving women equal rights in marriage. It was passed at the beginning of the month, but their president has not yet signed it into law. Women will no longer have to obey their husbands under the law. Currently Malian women are subject to violence, particularly wife beating and genital mutilation. (Which is what is going on in the disturbing photo.)

A spokesperson for the National Union of Muslim Women’s Association told the BBC:

We have to stick to the Koran.A man must protect his wife, a wife must obey her husband. It’s a tiny minority of women here that wants this new law – the intellectuals. The poor and illiterate women of this country – the real Muslims – are against it.

We need to tell them it’s pointless to covert an atheist, though. We can never be forgiven. Which comes as quite a relief to me. It’s like a Get Out of Jail Free card. “Sorry, I’m irredeemable. I am not the drone you are looking for. Move along.”

Strangely, when a local DJ made “threatening comments” about the president recently, the secret service showed up. My daughter heard on the radio that he and his close friends and family are going to be watched for some period of time.

So where is the secret service in this situation? The DJ is not the kind of guy anyone takes seriously. But the psycho preacher? Ask Dr. Tiller’s family if people take religious nutjobs seriously.

Last week I read that death threats against Obama are 300% higher than they ever were for Dubya and the secret service can’t keep up. I saw a photo of a protest rally in Arizona with people walking around in the open with semi-automatic weapons and signs saying things like death to obama. America is out of control. The rest of world watches in horror.

I say they make a deal with her. They lock her in a cell and she stays in said cell until her son is resurrected. If it happens, the state supports her and her son in luxury for the rest of their lives. Sounds fair to me. I mean, if she’s a true believer.

Man, this stuff is sick. I can’t believe some of the ridiculous things people do- and then they try to claim “Oh, well, atrocities are OK because it’s my religion.” Yeah, whatever. If you’re going to be a psychopath, just be one without hiding behind something!

@Annie Moose: Couple things. First, love the name! Also, you’re right on. It’s not so much religion I have a problem with — until it’s turned into an excuse to be a psychopath, that is. I actually don’t have a huge issue with Christians. If they want to be delusional, that’s great. Long as they don’t try to convince me to become one of them, or try to tell me their religion is all rainbows and puppy dogs, we’re cool.

Oh my god. Heidi, please, tell me someone stuffed up badly and this is a joke.

My half-sister is 12, this year.

“I hope she’s been well-treated this entire 18 years.”

Epic, epic facepalm. Being raped and forced to bear children isn’t exactly being “well-treated” in my books. And even in the extremely unlikely event that she wanted to have these kids, for her to have been kept like that from her parents is cruel in itself.

Yeah, I wish it had been a sick joke. The BBC article has an aerial photo of the backyard where she was chained. It looks suburban. I don’t get how nobody found her all those years. Or why the guy’s wife was a willing participant from the beginning. WTF??

This pastor being the asshole who’s telling his congregation that he’s praying for President Obama’s death. Dude, we lived through eight years of Bush-strocities. We’re done. We’re taking the government back from the right wing psychos for Jesus. STFU and deal.

This pastor is also the same guy who had the YouTube video about the police in Texas abusing him and tazering him. Yeah, I can imagine why he got tazered if he acted like he does in the audio on CNN. He’s a raving lunatic. The police were probably scared.

Well, I haven’t studied up on it, but I believe it just happens, it’s not something the abuser makes happen. It’s something along the lines of most people in such a situation either go mad or they attach to their keeper in order to have some semblance of sanity. Patty Hurst was the most famous case. Don’t know if you know abut her, she is the daughter of the founder of a newspaper dynasty in California. A group called the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped her and held her for several months. She ended up believeing in they’re anarchic philsophy and was photgraphed robbing a bank with them, holding an uzi. It’s a famous image.

Anyway, let’s not forget the wife is apparently every bit as complicit in this as he is. She sexually and physically abused the girl too. Sick stuff.

Did they ever try to get ransom for Patty? I was *really* little when that was going on, so I never saw the news stories at the time. But I always wondered, why kidnap someone from an obscenely rich family and then convert her, not ransom her? I mean, I visited Hearst Castle in CA when I was a kid. Obscenely rich is practically an understatement. Nauseatingly rich, maybe.

I feel like the guy and the wife were more or less the same person twice. She even went with him on the kidnapping, as the step-father described a man and a woman who grabbed her and stuffed her in a car.

Speaking of Stockholm Syndrome, btw, Bill O’Reilly doesn’t believe in it. He thinks the victims enjoy staying with their abusers. Here’s what he had to say back in 2007 about Missouri kidnapping victim Shawn Hornbeck.

Bill O’Reilly stated on his program that Shawn’s “experience in captivity was fun”….and that “he liked it”. According to O’Reilly, Shawn Hornbeck enjoyed being victimized by his captor…. A man who will go down in history as one of the worst child predators of all time.
O’Reilly was asserting that since Hornbeck did not try to get away…. he must have liked it.

Well it’s never been a secret that you have to ignore reason and logic to swallow superstition. Even intelligent people who profess belief will admit that. They simply insist that faith in good. As idiotic as that is.

To me, faith is depressing. It’s like never growing out of the age where you hide under the covers from the monsters and wish really hard for them to go away. Gah, that’s depressing to even think about.

That’s a very apt analogy since religion is all about fear. They want you to be afraid that if you don’t believe you’ll go to hell. They want you to believe, in the case of Christianity that you were born a sinner.

I was always afraid of some stupid thing or another when I was a believer/kid. My parents were both raised SDA. Religion and church weren’t part of our lives, but the underlying superstitious mindset was. The world was all full of spooky woo for her.

Absolutely. That said, there are, however, some brilliant people who believe. It’s that whole faith thing. I’ve still not found anyone who can tell me any real difference between faith and wishful thinking.

I would love to have someone intelligent try to argue that there is. It would be interesting.

Here is an article we may roll our eyes and utter “Duh?” at. It essentially says that while fundamentalism is good at keep societal coherence, it is resistant to change, and thus will damage society later.

I’ve still not found anyone who can tell me any real difference between faith and wishful thinking.

Disney told us. When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true. So that’s different.

Fundiethink: I was reading the comments on Amazon yesterday for a book that calls the extreme religious right Fascists. This one guy (who obviously didn’t read the book)was going on about how it was written with a leftist-christian-hating agenda, blah, blah, blah. Which was pretty funny considering it was written by a Christian who has a Masters of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School. The guy is also a journalist, and has worked for the Christian Science Monitor, among other publications.

It gives me hope that at least some of the non-fundies will stand up against them. That’s a large part of the problem right there. The moderates don’t denounce them, so these people think everybody is going right along with their crazy.

You know, one of these days, when a fundie person gets all Pascal’s Wager, I need to ask them something. What if they die, against all logic and evidence, they get up to the Christian heaven, (pearly gates, St. Peter, the whole thing), and god wants to know why they didn’t listen to the Pope. You can use their exact same arguments. “Did you not hear that the Pope was my representative on earth? He said it on TV and everything.” “Um…” “But you didn’t believe him. Even though he told you. And you followed the Protestant rebellion against my Pope.”

I mean, seriously. They’re screwed too, in that scenario. Probably more screwed, since they actually like their god and want to go to his heaven. I’m cool with hanging out with the “you’ll just get knowledge” guy if it comes to that.

This reminds me of a Law & Order: SVU episode. Here. My most memorable moment in this is when the father of the boy who got attacked (stabbed in the back and had his spinal cord severed by the 8-year-old girl he was bullying) told Stabler (one of the detectives) that “[he didn’t] care if [his] son called her a fag bitch dyke [not verbatim] from hell, [he wanted] her arrested.”

I’ve seen that before with the Christians being against anti-bullying rules applying to gay kids. :-( That nutcase Laurie Higgins who was harassing Hemant Mehta and trying to get him fired supports that position. She said something like “it legitimizes” being gay. TFB lady.

Yeah, I heard about that. The laws in Australia vary from state to state, and apparently, she lived in the wrong state… We’re actually pretty good about it in Victoria, the morning-after pill is freely available, as are abortions (but they do cost up to $600 out of pocket).

I noticed a lot of people on PZ’s site said Queensland was weird. Are they weird about other stuff, too? Is it because they’re closer to the equator? Like our highest concentrations of crazies are down south…

Queenslanders are weird. Kinda all-round weird. I don’t think it’s their proximity to the equator, northern WA (Western Australia) and NT (Northern Territory) are in about the same region, and they don’t have the same kind of whacky. They’re kind of like our California and Southerners combined. Fundy hippies. If that makes sense?

Oh shi- I just remembered that I applied to university up there. :| Wish me luck surviving the nuts?

Wackos are everywhere. Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but to carry on. (with apologies to CSN&Y).

As for the U.S., yes, the south has it’s share but Idaho and eastern Washington is Fruitcake Central, lemme tell ya. It’s another planet up there. Alaska is another hotbed of irrational stupidity. Think Sarah Palin.

Queensland I haven’t noticed to have a lot of them, they’re certainly not on the Gold Coast or the Sunshine Coast, and Byron Bay is not unlike a small town version of San Francisco in the 70’s. Rather quaint and postcard-like.

Here’s one I don’t get. A marine’s widow and son are being denied immigration from Japan. He proposed while he was in Japan. They were married by proxy after he shipped out to Iraq, once they found out they were pregnant. But he was killed in action and they never saw each other after the wedding. Apparently the US doesn’t recognize their marriage as consummated, son or not.

The article says this is “because it is inconsistent with Western Christian ideas of how marriage takes place.” But when I posted it on my Facebook wall, the two most right-wing religious people I know both commented that it was a horrible thing. So who the hell is supporting this crap law?? And if we all agree it’s not ok, then why is it even there?

Hey, blufindr? I don’t know if you’re following the posts over at Hemant’s site (Friendly Atheist), but there’s an 8th grade kid over there who asked for advice on coming out as a atheist. If you have anything helpful for someone that age, the post is here. The kid wrote to Richard Wade’s Ask Richard column and signed as “Alone.”

I didn’t even know I was an atheist at that age, so I’ve really got nothing on the dealing with it front.

I am so disgusted with humans right now that I can barely form a coherent sentence. How and when did people decide that being so hateful was okay? Telling women and girls to kill themselves cause they dishonored the family, running people down in cars, preventing your husband from seeing your face, family killing family? It’s atrocious! It goes against all reason, sense, and logic. I am truly appalled.

(In Boulder Colorado Derik Bonestroo fired a gun…) gun to my head: I’m and Catholic, a Jew, a Christian, Muslims, whatever. Atheism is about logic, and dieing over imaginary friends goes ageist that. so you living for your belief.

This religion thing is absolutely amazing. Don’t forget the immense masses that have it in a lower dosage (as in France or most of Europe).
They don’t do weird things but they also do not realize they have a thinking problem with a half-forgotten, half conscious childish propaganda that blocks them. In Nietzsche’s lingo I would say they’ve unconsciously traded nobility for folk dancing.

Yes, spitting is vile, but considering that the Christians tortured and murder Jews from the 5th century up until the second world war . . . well, is spitting that bad in light of what happened to the Jews from Christian hatred. Let them spit.

I wasn’t saying that I’m a fan of Christianity. LOL. I’d be quite happy to see it and every other religion disappear from the planet. I was just saying that spitting makes my gorge rise. Normally I don’t back the Christians on anything, which is why I thought it worth remarking.

@Hitmann – Yes the bible is well published and I agree that it merits a thorough reading, as one cannot truly reject or agree with something that they do not know, But arguably it is just as important to read up on the other major religions of the world as a majority of the world is not christian.

To all those Theists who think that atheists will change their opinion just because of people believe it and so ‘there must be something to religion’ remember this:

A lie is a lie, even if everyone believes it, and the truth is the truth even if nobody believes it.

Sorry, this isn’t really in response to anyone, but I read the comments (almost all 600 of them) on the original and I’m all riled up by the apparent absence of logic used by the theists in that thread.

Religions are seething with filth, and have been since the beginning of time. Religions are formed and sustained to create a power structure for bullies, to control the masses and prevent their defending themselves from abuse.

@Dana – “…considering that the Christians tortured and murder Jews … up until the second world war . . . well, is spitting that bad in light of what happened to the Jews from Christian hatred?”

As a matter of fact, yes, it is. Are the xians that the jews are spitting on the ones that murdered their family? Are the jews that are spitting ones that actually lost current family members? That kind of mentality is was causes wars out of nothing. It’s like black people spitting on white people because 150 years ago some white people owned slaves. It’s moronic, irrational, self-centered, racist (in most cases), emotional thinking and it is what is wrong with most of the world today. So they use spit instead of bullets, so the bigotry isn’t as bad as it *could* be, but it’s still bigotry based on moronic delusional superstitions.